A NEW BROOM
If one stage typified the 2017 Itzulia – the local name for the race – the third stage was it. After the start in Vitoria, the stage contained six climbs on the way to San Sebastián, which the race hadn’t stopped in since 1975. Under gunmetal skies a strong, nine-man break went clear and the race settled into a typical stage scenario. Most of the parcours was on broad, open roads. “A lamentable edition,” one Spanish blogger wrote. “The race, considered by many professionals as their favourite, is a bland soup where even the general good weather leaves an impression of sadness.”
That sense of an atypical, easier edition was shared by Enekoitz Beltran, a fan stood on the mist-dampened category 1 Santa Ageda climb halfway through the stage. The climb is a fairly regular haunt of the race and, in 2017, the moment where the race reverted to type and became hilly. Beltran, 32 years old, was explaining how he disliked Sky and Movistar’s defensive tactics when he broke off to cheer on the break. He ran to the roadside and shouted his heart out, before returning to his wife and onemonth-old son. Moments later, the peloton came around the corner led by a familiar black and blue train. “Sky!” he groaned.
When the race came back together, Quick-Step’s David de la Cruz sprang an opportunistic attack over the final climb, the Mendizorrotz, and clung on to take the stage and the leader’s jersey. For an audience conditioned to seeing stages rip through the peloton and shattered riders crossing the line in ones and twos, it was a disappointing spectacle. The parcours was the confection of a new set of younger, more sensitive route planners led by Julián Eraso. He’s an old hand who has previously organised the Euskal Bizikleta, a race that has been uneasily incorporated into the Tour of the Basque Country. Eraso has taken over from a bombastic 70-year-old, José Luis Arrieta, who organised the preceding 40 editions before he retired in January. Eraso said he had scrambled to confirm the route and produce the technical material for the race.
Asked if he thought the race had lost its identity, he defended the parcours to El Diaro País Vasco. “Making the race harder doesn’t produce a bigger battle. In modern cycling, the same script is repeated: a break goes and is controlled until the peloton launches the chase in the final kilometres. It doesn’t matter what profile you have.”
Although some fans were appalled by what they saw as a sanitised route, the riders were generally complimentary. As one insider told us, riders had been muttering for years about the danger of the course – a sentiment that had pre-dated Peter Stetina’s career-threatening collision with a poorly marked metal pole in a stage finale in Bilbao during the 2015 edition. That incident, for which Arrieta’s team were slow to admit responsibility, had cast a pall over the race.
But neither was criticism of the race general among fans. Josu Aizpuru, an engineering student, told us his line in the sand was the climb of Arrate. As long as that was included, the race would be okay. That rendezvous was due in a couple of days.